The Monster That Morphed Into a Metaphor

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

IT'S just 50 years since a 150-foot-tall prehistoric creature with a
spiky back, a nasty attitude and radioactive breath rose from the sea to
pulverize Tokyo. The Japanese called the beast Gojira. When it arrived on
our shores it was rechristened "Godzilla, King of the Monsters," though
the big fella had in fact lost a good deal of his terrifying majesty in
the passage.

Godzilla takes a
shortcut...

Film Forum in Manhattan is celebrating the anniversary of the pre-eminent
movie monster of the 50's with a two-week presentation of the restored,
uncut, Japanese-language version of "Godzilla" (opening on Friday). And
while this might not, on the face of it, seem like one of the more
urgently needed film-preservation projects, the buffed-up "Godzilla,"
radically different from the truncated, risibly dubbed version American
audiences know, is a surprisingly compelling pop-culture artifact: a
picture of the strange forms nuclear anxiety took in an era that now feels
nearly as remote as the Jurassic.

For Godzilla was, even in its bowdlerized "King of the Monsters"
incarnation, an obvious gigantic, unsubtle, grimly purposeful metaphor for
the atomic bomb. The Americanized "Godzilla,' which removed about 40
minutes from the Japanese original and inserted 20 minutes or so of new
scenes featuring a sympathetic Yank journalist (played, with burly
gravitas, by Raymond Burr), did its darnedest to minimize the nuclear
theme. A lot of the Japanese characters' explicit references to the bomb
were jettisoned. But Godzilla's back story was left basically intact:
the beast, we're told, had lived more or less peacefully in the ocean for
a few hundred thousand years (only very occasionally requiring the
sacrifice of a virgin or two by nearby islanders), until H-bomb testing
killed off its food supply and, as its fiery exhalations indicate,
irradiated the creature itself. And since the stateside distributors were
understandably reluctant to tamper with the meat-and-potatoes scenes of
the monster's rampages, the most memorable images, even in the American
version, are those of a Japanese city burned and crushed to dust by a
lethal, apparently ungovernable force. You'd have to be pretty thick--
thicker than Raymond Burr--to miss the point.

The most significant difference, really, between the Japanese "Godzilla,"
directed by Ishiro Honda, and "Godzilla, King of the Monsters," which
credits one Terry Morse as co-director, is that of tone. Honda's
"Godzilla," while far from a great movie, has a distinctively haunted,
elegiac quality, which surfaces only sporadically (and, in its new
context, puzzlingly) in the choppy "King of the Monsters." Bad dubbing, of
course, imparts at least a whiff of ridiculousness to any movie, and in
the case of "Godzilla" it works like a toxic cloud. If audiences remember
the Japanese monster movies of the 50's as campy, cheesy spectacles, it's
partly the soundtracks that are to blame: no matter what horrors are
unfolding on the screen, the sound of dialogue that appears to have been
learned phonetically, emanating from actors whose lips move with the
surreal irrelevance of ventriloquists' dummies, does sort of undercut the
solemnity of the proceedings.

And Honda's "Godzilla" is extraordinarily solemn, full of earnest
discussions about how to respond to the apocalyptic threat one thoughtful
scientist, played by the perennially wise-seeming Takashi Shimura, argues
that the monster should not be killed but studied for clues to surviving
the effects of radiation and long, mournful pans across the rubble of
post-Godzilla Tokyo. (Some of these shots are eerily reminiscent of scenes
from Akira Kurosawa's 1949 thriller "Stray Dog," on which Honda had worked
as an assistant.) In "Godzilla," the comic-book premise is never allowed
to overwhelm the director's clear intention to measure the aftershocks of
the nuclear obliteration, nine years earlier, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The outlandish metaphors of the science-fiction and horror genres are
useful vehicles for imagining the unimaginable, speaking the
unspeakable.
In pop creations like "Godzilla," the blunt metaphors, like the monsters
themselves, tend to develop minds of their own: they run rampant,
flattening even the sturdiest intentions. The most peculiar thing about
Godzilla as a metaphor for the bomb is the creature's simultaneous status
as a legendary beast of Japanese islanders' mythology: surely a more
precise representation of the disaster that befell the country at the end
of the Second World War would be an agent of destruction from far away,
unheard of even in legend, not this native, almost familiar monster. Is
Godzilla, then, also on some subterranean level a metaphor for Japan's
former imperial ambitions, which finally unleashed the retaliatory fury
that leveled its cities?

Maybe. But the the runaway metaphor of Honda's Godzilla isn't nearly so
easy to pin down. It's more ambiguous, more generalized and perhaps more
potent than that. And its significance can be glimpsed only in the
Japanese version of the movie, because what Honda's "Godzilla" is most
fundamentally about, I think, is a society's desire to claim its deepest
tragedies for itself, to assimilate them as elements of its historical
identity. The world of the uncut, un-Americanized original "Godzilla" is
literally insular. There's no occupying army, no heavy-set Caucasian
reporters, no United Nations representatives, nothing but Japanese people,
screaming at, worrying about and ultimately vanquishing their Japanese
monster. By the end of the picture, Godzilla himself seems already on his
way to becoming a beloved figure. Dying, the beast sinks into the sea with
one last plaintive roar, and Honda gives him the sort of send-off our
westerns used to reserve for those stubborn old gunfighters that history
kept leaving behind. All that's missing is "Shall We Gather at the River."

Having claimed this monster as its own, Japan or at least, the Toho film
studio was then free to export it. Toho cranked out dozens of
prehistoric-creature features in the next couple of decades (many of them
directed by an increasingly unengaged Honda), and the anguished resonances
of the original "Godzilla" were never heard again. The metaphor had
slipped its moorings and headed far out to sea, refitted as a tacky cruise
ship. It's no wonder the jocular, mega-budget American remake landed with
such a spectacular thud in 1998: even the Japanese hadn't believed in
their metaphor for ages, and had long since turned their home-grown
monsters into lovable entertainers.

In Honda's berserk "Destroy All Monsters" (1968), for example, we find
Toho's repertory company of scary creatures warehoused on an island
called, none too imaginatively, Monsterland, where they live in slightly
crotchety coexistence with each other, like retirees in a managed-care
facility. For part of the movie, they're permitted to revert to their old,
bad, global-destruction-threatening selves, but it's not their fault;
they're being controlled by space aliens. And in the end, the Toho
monsters, like tag-team wrestlers, get together to administer an
old-fashioned scaly-tail whipping to the space creature Ghidrah. Godzilla,
our hero, raises his stubby arms in triumph, while his son, who looks
disturbingly like Barney the dinosaur, does a happy dance.

Horror turns to silliness so quickly in popular culture, and that may be
the final, unfathomably ambiguous meaning of Godzilla, the Metaphor That
Ate Japan. He's the embodiment, in a way, of the movies' Strangelovian
power to domesticate the worst, the most unthinkable experience. For 50
years, Godzilla has been teaching us to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Terrence Rafferty is the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of
Writing About the Movies."

Godzilla, King of the Monsters a k a Godzilla 1956 - Japan/USA - Sci-Fi
Action/Monster Film/Natural Horror/Sci-Fi Horror
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Starring Raymond Burr, Akihiko Hirata, Momoko Kochi, Takashi Shimura,
Akira Takarada. Directed by Terrell O. Morse. (NR, 80 minutes).
Filmed in 1954 as Gojira, this grandaddy of all Japanese giant-reptile epics was
picked up for American distribution two years later, at which time several
newly-filmed inserts, featuring Raymond Burr as reporter Steve Martin (!), were
expertly rabetted into the original footage. In both the Japanese and American
versions of Godzilla, the story is basically the same: A 400-foot amphibious monster,
brought back to life by underwater nuclear testing, goes on a rampage in a tinker-toy
Tokyo. An eccentric scientist (Takashi Shimura) does his best to destroy the beast
with his heretofore discredited invention, the Oxygen Destroyer. Though Godzilla is
apparently disintegrated in the climax, this didn't prevent Toho Studios from
grinding out an endless series of sequels, with the title character becoming less
destructive and more lovable with each subsequent film. Hampered by a low budget
which precluded stop-motion animation, special-effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya was
forced to rely upon an actor (Haru Nakajima) in a rubber Godzilla suit. Incidentally,
the name "Gojira", a combination of "gorilla" and "kujira", is Japanese slang for
"big clumsy ox", and was allegedly the nickname of one of the Toho stagehands!
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide